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Victory!

* Anatole Kaletsky: Associate Editor of The Times* Professor Norman Stone: Professor of International Relations and Director of the Russian Centre at Bilkent University, Ankara.* Alexei Pushkov: Anchor of the most popular Russian TV programme “Post Scriptum” which has considerable influence on Russian public perception of international events.

Speakers against the motion:

* Edward Lucas: Central and Eastern Europe correspondent for the The Economist and author of The New Cold War: How the Kremlin Menaces Both Russia and the West (2008).

Thursday, December 17, 2009

Europe view has now come out without a break for 163 weeks, for those who like statistics. That may make it the longest-running column dealing with CEE in the mainstream media, but it's Christmas so who's counting

Looking to the starsDec 17th 2009 From Economist.com

A little seasonal wisdom for the eastTHE reindeer are straining at the harness, the sledge is packed and snow is falling softly all over central and eastern Europe. So what should Santa bring the region?

A wishlist is easily drafted. A quick return to economic growth; a louder voice in the councils of international organisations such as the European Union (and better decisions by them); more attention from the American administration; a neighbourly Russia. But such a list belongs in the same category as childish scrawls in crayon, asking Father Christmas to bring a magic rabbit and an invisibility cloak.

In the real world, the best that the region can hope for is rather more limited. The top priority is to hope that western Europe—the main export market for the region—does not plunge into another, deeper recession. The financial tsunami of the past 12 months has receded, leaving the basic structure of economics and politics in the region covered in seaweed and shabby, but intact. No government has fallen to the temptations of economic autarky and political populism: those messages are preached on the sidelines by the likes of Hungary’s Jobbik, but the political mainstream remains untouched.

That is cause for relief—and also gratitude. Some politicians have put national interest above their own short-term popularity. Outsiders deserve thanks too, such as the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development and the European Commission, which together with the IMF and some national governments cobbled together deals that kept the western-owned banks in the region from pulling the plug on their stricken local subsidiaries. Santa should reward them, just as he delivers lumps of coal to those who have been less helpful.

Any presents from the new European Commission are likely to be ill-chosen and disappointing. But one big and practical offering would be a beefed-up EU presence in Crimea. An EU-sponsored higher education institution, cultural centre and visa office would be a powerful counterweight to Russia's “soft power” efforts and would signal EU commitment to Ukraine, even while the question of membership is on hold.

NATO may not send anything, barring some exercises in the Baltic next summer. It is transfixed by the needs of Afghanistan, devoting its spare moments to examining its own navel. The best that can be hoped for is that it does not weaken its collective security guarantee by discussing it to death.

What the region really needs—and only it can provide—is a new account of itself. The great story of the past 20 years needs a new chapter. Many ex-communist countries have joined what were once “western” clubs such as the EU and NATO. But “enlargement fatigue” means that the next lap of EU expansion is likely to be slow. And being in the club does not mean that you get taken seriously: almost every top job in the EU, NATO and other big outfits is held by westerners.

The virtuous circle of low labour costs, foreign investment and export-led growth is outdated too. The region has lost some of its competitiveness. And it should not aim to stay only as a low-cost provider of goods and services for the rich west.

The best way to be taken seriously is to have something new and interesting to say. The ex-communist countries need to show that their brainpower, creativity and innovation deserve a place at the top table. A big asset is that people in the region are used to radical change in a way that the old, tired countries of western Europe can hardly imagine.

Europe needs that dynamism, innovation and flexibility more than ever. Please Santa, bring sharp pencils for the Christmas thinkfest.

Life is getting friendlier but less interesting. Blame technology, globalisation and feminism

Illustration by Madamesange

A PRIVATE visit to the castle of Vaduz in Liechtenstein is a treat for many reasons. One is to see a fine private art collection. Another is a chance to use an otherwise unusable German word. As the only German-speaking feudal country in the world, Liechtenstein is the last refuge of that language’s traditional forms of aristocratic address. The reigning prince, Hans Adam II, whose splendiferous full name in German is Johannes (Hans)-Adam II. Ferdinand Alois Josef Maria Marko d’Aviano Pius Fürst von und zu Liechtenstein, Herzog von Troppau und Jägerndorf, Graf zu Rietberg, is the only person in the world who can seriously be addressed as Durchlaucht (Serenity).

Like much foreign formality, it sounds odd in English. So does “Je vous prie de bien vouloir agréer, Monsieur, l’expression de mes sentiments distingués” which is how you might end a business letter in French (it means, more or less, “I ask you kindly to accept, Sir, the assurance of my highest consideration”). In English a “yours sincerely” or even a simple “regards” would suffice; French-style floridity survives, just, only in the context of diplomatic correspondence. For the most part, and in most places, the era of “Serene Highnesses” and “Your Excellencies” is over. This is part of a big shift away from clear, detailed conventions about politeness of the past and towards a blurred but largely egalitarian world that prizes phoney friendliness over formality.

One of the main reasons is the spread of English. Compared with other languages, it is sadly limited in the range of possible forms of politeness it offers. A few thousand people have titles, either inherited or awarded for political reasons, such as the new European foreign minister, Lady (Catherine) Ashton. Members of the established church have handles such as “Your Grace” (for an archbishop) or “Very Reverend” (for a dean). But for the vast majority of commoners and lay people, English has since the middle ages had no formal honorific speech beyond sparse choices such as “Mr”, “Dr” or “Professor”.

Other cultures are far more elaborate. In former Habsburg countries visiting cards habitually bear titles such as JUDr. (Doctor of Law), Ing. (Engineer) or Dipl.-Kfm. (a degree in business). A visit to an Austrian cemetery offers a landscape engraved with even grander titles such as Dr. theol., k. k. Hofrat (“Doctor of Divinity, Imperial and Royal Court Counsellor”).

Nothing like that has ever really existed in English, which also offers no gradation of respect via conjugation or personal pronoun: with “thou” and “ye” gone since the 17th century, everyone is just “you”. English also has few of the diminutives that add subtlety to Slavic social interchange. In languages like Czech, the move from Jana to Janka and then Janicka signals a subtle increase in intimacy each time. In English, that may happen if you are called William (and your friends call you Bill and your close family Willy) but it is the exception, not the rule. Unlike, say, Japanese, English has no special verb forms for politeness, humility and respect. What it does have is useful social lubricants such as please (absent or rarely used in some other languages). That has long made it possible to have a polite conversation in English, without worrying too much about what you actually call the other person.

If you sign all your e-mails with “love and vibes”, how do you show true affection and intimacy?

And over the past 30 years, the narrow options in English have shrunk further. First names have become the standard form of address between English-speaking adults. They once signified a great deal but now mean almost nothing. Old films show how the system used to work. In “The Lavender Hill Mob” (1951), two middle-class men are celebrating a seemingly perfect bullion robbery, during which they have addressed each other only by their surnames. In what would now be called a moment of male bonding the renegade bank clerk, Henry Holland (played by Alec Guinness), tenderly asks his co-conspirator, “May I call you Alfred?”

That surname code had governed social intercourse in the English-speaking world for centuries. Male social equals called each other by their surnames, sometimes (but certainly not always) moving on to first names when the moment warranted it. A touch of intimacy could be added with a prefix. When Winston Churchill returned to the government in September 1939, Franklin Roosevelt, for example, wrote him a personal note addressing him fondly as “My dear Churchill”. Inferiors could use “Mr” or an American-style “Sir” when addressing their betters.

Rules for women were slightly different, which was to prove important when social changes brought more women into the workplace: Miss or Mrs (but never Ms) was the rule between equals. First names were for close relatives, intimate friends and for when addressing subordinates. Occasionally (in girls’ schools for example) unadorned male-style surnames were used. “Madam”, usually contracted to “Ma’am” was for high superiors.

Such rules softened only slightly in subsequent years. In “Fawlty Towers”, a British television comedy series set in a mismanaged hotel in Torquay in south-west England, the proprietor (played by John Cleese) is called “Mr Fawlty” by tradesmen, strangers and his employees. He mostly uses “Mr” in return, though he calls his staff, such as the long-suffering housemaid, Polly, by their first names. Those who know him better, such as his longtime guest, Major Gowen (whose first name is never divulged), call him “Fawlty”. Only his termagant wife and her friends call him “Basil”.

Gordon Brown this year scandalised Americans by referring to their president as “Barack”

But shortly after “Fawlty Towers” finished its short run in 1975, that social code crumbled. Across professional and business life, lawyers, business people, army officers, academics, doctors and diplomats began using Christian names; the use of the surname among adults shrivelled (though old-fashioned schools retain it).

Margaret Thatcher, prime minister from 1979 to 1990, already called her ministers mostly by their Christian names except in cabinet meetings, where formal titles were used (as in “Yes, Prime Minister”). But under Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, all pretence of formality has gone. Mr Brown, on a trip to Washington this year, scandalised Americans by referring to the president as “Barack”, rather than the “Mr President” that convention dictates. Mrs Thatcher and Ronald Reagan were on “Ronnie” and “Margaret” terms—but only during their most private chats.

The use of surnames now even looks demeaning. George Bush liked using them—but when in July 2006 he was caught addressing the British prime minister as “Yo Blair” many thought it epitomised Britain’s servile role in the transatlantic relationship. That started decades earlier. Dick Allen, a former White House adviser, remembers President Richard Nixon’s habit of using unadorned surnames, sometimes with belittling intent. Reagan usually called his staff by their first names in their presence.

Illustration by Madamesange

The intimate use of the surname has almost disappeared. Over a year, your correspondent found only one example of an adult relationship where surnames are still used unaffectedly. A septuagenarian pensioner living in the epitome of English respectability, Tunbridge Wells, Michael Larsen, has a friend who since school has addressed him as “Larsen”. It is not that unusual in Tunbridge Wells, he says, though on his daily trip to Starbucks the youthful staff call him “Michael”. “I find it rather refreshing,” he says.

One reason, at least in the English-speaking world, is feminism. The arrival of significant numbers of women in previously mostly male institutions created a problem for the old code of mutual surname use. “I refused to address a man as ‘Dear Bloggins’, as I hadn’t been to public [ie, private] school with him. And I would have been offended at being addressed as ‘Gunn’,” recalls Janet Gunn, a Sovietologist who joined Britain’s Foreign Office in 1970. At a time of wider social change, few wanted more formality rather than less. So the rules soon changed to first names all round, though ambassadors, at least in public, may be called “Your Excellency” by other diplomats and “Sir” or, particularly if female, “Ambassador” by their own staff.

This shift, the biggest in the English politeness code since “thee” and “thou” fell into disuse, has accelerated. “Mrs” and “Miss”, once important (if unfair) social distinctions, have given way to a ubiquitous “Ms”, even for the most wifely of women. And even these vestigial titles, along with “Mr” are vanishing too, shed within minutes of the first meeting. That trend is particularly pronounced in Britain and the English-speaking Commonwealth. America is a bit more formal, and countries such as India even more so. But when English and foreign politeness codes overlap, it is usually the English one that wins.

Businesses from countries where formality is still strong have to adjust to that. “When we go on a road show to meet investors in New York and London, we are on first name terms while we speak English. But as soon as we are speaking German again, it is Dr Schmidt and Herr Braun,” says the public relations chief for one of Germany’s best-known firms.

But even outside English, the shift towards informality seems inexorable. The use of the informal forms of speech such as tu (French), ty (Slavic languages) and du (German and Swedish) grew sharply in continental Europe after the social upheavals of the late 1960s. Stuffiness in social interaction was a symbol of the despised elder generation’s cultural hegemony. The collapse of authoritarian regimes gave the process another heave.Usted (a third-person form of address in Spain) went out of fashion among all but the elderly after the end of the Franco regime. Third-party forms are on the retreat elsewhere too. In Poland, where the use of Pan [Sir] and Pani [Madam] was once a sign of resistance to communist-era efforts to strip the language of its feudal past, things are changing too. The plural form now sounds unfriendly, says Mateusz Cygnarowski, a translator. Even the singular form is now often modified with the use of a first name—which older Poles find disconcertingly chummy in the mouths of strangers.

The counter-culture was one stimulus. Another was convenience. The Swedish reform, for example, binned a three-tier system in which du signalled intimacy and ni meant distance while a polite third-person form, using the equivalents of “Sir” and “Madam”, often coupled with job titles, was used for politeness and in public.

The first big change in that came in 1967 when Bror Rexed, the head of a state medical agency, issued a formal decree that he wished to be addressed with his first name and du, and expected the rest of his staff to do likewise. In 1969 the Swedish Social Democrat prime minister, Olof Palme, instructed reporters to use du when asking him questions. Though some nostalgic Swedes have tried to revive the ni form, for example in advertisements stressing ultra-courteous customer service, du and its equivalents are now all but universal across the Nordic countries, to the lingering dismay of the well brought-up. The third-person form survives only in rare cases, such as in addressing royalty and in public sessions of the Swedish parliament.

Formal address forms do still survive strongly elsewhere in Europe, sometimes to a surprising extent. In posh families in France, children are still expected to address their parents as vous. Martin Dewhirst, a British scholar, uses the informal ty when speaking Russian to his Lithuanian-Ukrainian daughter-in-law. But even after ten years, she still uses the formal vy to him and his (Russian) wife. “We suspect that this is because she has been well brought up in Kyiv,” he says, referring to the Ukrainian capital.

America, like the Indian subcontinent, remains a bastion of formal politeness in the English-speaking world, especially in public encounters. India has developed formulations such as “Good Sir”. Even unmodified, “Sir” and “Ma’am” are useful ways of addressing strangers in public, where the British code now allows only a feeble “Excuse me!” or a rude “Hey you”. In countries such as Japan and China, the use of first names is restricted to the very closest family members—spouses and parents. Foreigners hoping to cement their relationship with Japanese or Chinese counterparts by shifting to first-name terms are often unaware of the consternation—akin to public nose-blowing—they are causing.

Another powerful force for change is technology. Being formal in a snail-mail letter is only a minor extra inconvenience on top of finding pen, paper and envelope, writing it, and then folding, stuffing, addressing, stamping and posting the missive. But in an e-mail that takes only seconds to write, formality is a burden. E-mail’s immediacy also erodes the sense of personal distance. In the early days of e-mail, business letters were sent as attachments, properly formatted and even with the senders’ signature scanned and positioned at the end. Modern e-mails are much simpler. The opening salutation, with the unsatisfactory choice of “Dear Mr” or “Dear Joe Smith” may give way to an anodyne “Greetings”, “Hello” or even the dreaded “Hi there”.

Hand-held devices such as mobile phones and BlackBerrys have accelerated the effect. Typing a formal salutation or sign-off with one’s thumbs strains even the starchiest correspondent. Nowadays in English-language instant messaging, the opening salvo of politeness, however mandatory in other languages and cultures, can be omitted all together; the first line of the missive appears in the subject line, while the signoffs can be as brief as “brgds”, followed by a single initial. An automated message at the end of the e-mail, apologising for terseness and blaming the tiny keyboard, signals to the reader that no offence is intended.

Illustration by Madamesange

Although technology has compressed the spectrum of formality, it has not abolished it altogether. Using initials to sign an e-mail avoids the suggestion of excessive intimacy that comes with a first name, or the deliberate distance signalled by a full one. In French, Bien à vous is short and polite. In German, Gruss does the trick. In Polish, e-mails can start with Witam (literally “Welcome”) and end with Pozdrawiam (literally: “I greet”). Emoticons (facial expressions made up of punctuation marks) allow writers to convey feelings concisely ]:)

Though English is flattening politeness in speech, in some other respects the traffic is the other way. Handshaking is now a commonplace greeting; in England 50 years ago it was unusual at social gatherings and restricted even in the workplace. So is the reluctance (once entrenched among the English upper classes) to give presents at social occasions. Bringing a bottle of wine used to imply that your host’s cellar was empty; flowers were a slur on the hostess’s gardening skills. Now it is all but de rigueur not to arrive empty-handed. Hats and gloves are out. Kissing is all over the place, twice in Paris, thrice in Polish, four times in the south of France. But in Poland hand-kissing, once a flamboyant and ubiquitous way of greeting ladies, is declining. It is, says Pawel Dobrowolski, a Warsaw-based commentator, now usually deemed to be “a provincial attempt at appearing to be cultured”.

All this is grist to the mill of those who study politeness, formality and other branches of sociolinguistics and sociopragmatics. “Politeness studies” is a growing academic discipline; a summer school at Lancaster University in northern England this summer even developed a sub-branch, “Rudeness studies”. A “Journal of Politeness Research” was founded in 2005. Its most-downloaded article is by Miranda Stewart, a scholar based in Scotland. It is called “Protecting speaker’s face in impolite exchanges: The negotiation of face-wants in workplace interaction”.

Students of politeness explore many aspects of social behaviour: how status relates to language, the use of calculated rudeness in broadcast media interviews and the use of the intimate/formal forms of address (called the T-V divide after the French forms tuand vous). One of the big discoveries in the subject’s early days, says Ms Stewart, was that left-wing people, regardless of culture, tend to prefer intimate forms of address; more conservative speakers like formality. These days, the most contentious issue is the idea that politeness studies has been too Eurocentric. Chinese and other east Asian scholars argue vigorously (but politely) that the discipline is too heavily based on individualistic western concepts and takes too little account of collective norms.

At least to outsiders, the biggest question is what politeness actually is, and how it relates to other vital but slippery concepts such as deference, friendliness and formality. From one point of view, politeness is about being nice: easing social interaction by taking account of other people’s needs. Academics call this the “Grand Strategy of Politeness” (GSP). Geoffrey Leech of Lancaster University describes it thus: “the performance of polite speech acts such as requests, offers, compliments, apologies, thanks, and responses to these.” According to the GSP “a speaker communicates meanings which place (a) a high value on what relates to the other person (typically the addressee), and (b) a low value on what relates to the speaker”.

But plenty of so-called polite behaviour in real life is anything but. Being polite does not stop you being freezingly rude, or warmheartedly friendly. Similarly, politeness does not necessarily equate with formality, though it is hard to imagine someone being exceedingly polite but also utterly informal.

So what seems to be happening is that formal politeness, at least in spoken and written exchanges, is on the decline, thanks to globalisation (meaning the rise of flat, nuance-less English as a means of international communication), to social changes and to technology. Replacing it is a kind of neutral friendliness, where human encounters take place devoid of the signifiers of emotional and status differences that past generations found so essential.

That may lubricate business meetings. But it makes life outside the workplace less interesting. If you use first names everywhere at work, how do you signify to a colleague that you want to be a real friend? If you sign all e-mails “love and vibes”, how do you show intimacy? Much of the world has an answer to that, at least in their own languages and cultures. English-speakers may have triumphed on one front, but they are struggling on another.

FORMIDABLE, useful in war and, though picturesque, impractical in peacetime, the stone towers that dot Chechnya’s mountains could be regarded as symbols of its people. Wojciech Jagielski’s book sets new standards for gritty reporting of Russia’s most miserable corner, and the dreadful damage done to it by both outsiders and the Chechens’ own leaders.

Most readers will know something of the Chechen story: a toxic mix of terrorism, kidnapping, guerrilla warfare and reprisals. Two wars have ruined the country. Both began with attempts by Russia, over 100 times more populous, to restore order in what the Kremlin sees as a troublesome province. The first war, from 1994 to 1996, ended in a draw. The second, starting in 1999, has defeated the organised Chechen resistance, and installed a brutal local warlord, Ramzan Kadyrov, as Russia’s satrap. Chechnya is largely pacified, but it could hardly be called at peace.

What was all the bloodshed about? One point of view argues that the war was mainly a struggle against banditry. The tight-knit Chechen clan structure was ideally suited to running organised crime, first in the Soviet Union and then in Russia. Chechnya in the 1990s became the gangster capital of Russia, with a kidnapping industry that many believed was verging on organised slave trading.

Another viewpoint insists that this is a war about Islam, with the Chechens as fearsome harbingers of jihadism in the Caucasus. In the late 1990s no government recognised Chechnya or Taliban-run Afghanistan, but they had diplomatic relations with each other. Jihadist volunteers stiffened the Chechen resistance, and Chechens have repaid the favour in wars elsewhere. A third view dismisses all this as smears: the real truth is that Chechnya and its people are prisoners of the Russian empire, struggling heroically to regain the independence lost in the 19th century.

Mr Jagielski’s book shuns such stereotypes, while showing that all three perspectives have some validity. His first great asset is time spent on the ground. He is a journalist at Gazeta Wyborcza, Poland’s biggest independent daily. An heir of sorts to Ryszard Kapuscinski, he specialises, as did the older Polish reporter, in Africa, as well as Central Asia and the Caucasus. Whereas most journalists (foreign or local) visit Chechnya fleetingly, Mr Jagielski has lived there for repeated periods of many weeks, staying with Chechen families, slipping in and out of clandestine meetings with guerrilla commanders in safe houses under the noses of Russian troops.

The book brings to life the danger, squalor and misery of daily life in Chechnya with almost unbearable clarity. The partial stability of traditional clan practices was half-destroyed by the deportation of the entire nation to the steppes of Central Asia in 1944. The death and destruction of the past 20 years have finished the job—and opened the way for outsiders and youngsters, often with wilder ideas of their own.

That was an impossible challenge for the mainstream Chechen leadership—the dapper Jokhar Dudayev, the first president, and one of his ill-starred successors, Aslan Maskhadov. Both men had achieved high rank in the Soviet military (no small matter for Chechens, who tend to be distrusted and despised by Russians). They had exceptional military skills, but both were overwhelmed by the task of running a country in which personal and family honour counts for more than the law. Jailing a criminal, no matter how vile, is likely to cause a vendetta that will last for 12 generations.

Mr Jagielski paints memorable portraits of both men, and of their biggest headache, Shamil Basayev. The mercurial and brilliant unofficial military leader was responsible for some of the most revolting terrorist atrocities perpetrated in the Chechens’ name. Basayev, like the other more moderate Chechen leaders, was demonised by Russia and is now dead.

Mr Jagielski’s book is equally compelling about the lives of the more humble people among whom he has lived: Chechen fathers do not cuddle or play with their sons for fear of making them weak. Chechen women have become emancipated, unwillingly, by war: they spend a lot of time touring Russian prisons trying to recover their menfolk.

IN THE 1990s, when enlarging NATO to take in the ex-communist countries still seemed perilous and impractical, help came from an unexpected source. Yevgeny Primakov (pictured), a steely old Soviet spook who became first head of Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Service, then foreign minister and even, briefly, prime minister, liked to say that it would be “impermissible” for the alliance to admit ex-communist states.

His remarks, and others in similar vein by leading Russian politicians, proved counterproductive. The more the Kremlin huffed and puffed about ex-captive nations deciding their own future, the harder it became to dismiss those countries’ fears: if your neighbour terms it “impermissible” for you to install a burglar alarm, people will start taking your security worries seriously. Some wags even suggested that a “Primakov prize” be established to mark the boost he had given to the cause.

Now the same tactics are at work again. As readers of this column may know, the black hole in NATO’s security guarantee is that it has no formal contingency plans to defend its weakest members: the Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. If Russia is NATO’s friend—so the thinking went in the early years of this decade—no such plans are necessary. America has its own military plans: chiefly putting powerful naval forces in the North Atlantic to, if necessary, sink Russian warships and shoot down planes menacing the Baltic states. But NATO is paralysed by the fear, felt strongly in countries such as France and Germany, that any real military planning will be intolerably and destructively provocative towards Russia.

Faced with that constellation of forces, a sensible Russian response might be to adopt softly-softly tactics. Make it clear that the war in Georgia was a one-off (and a response to provocation). Give the Baltics and the Poles no reason to worry. Keep on using economic ties to make friends and influence people. The pressure for NATO to take a firmer stand will soon fizzle out.

Instead, Russia is adopting the opposite course. It habitually violates Baltic airspace. It maintains a vocal propaganda offensive (such as a report being launched in Brussels this week by a Russian-backed think-tank, which criticises Baltic language and citizenship laws). This autumn, it scandalised NATO opinion by running two big military exercises, without foreign observers, based on highly threatening scenarios (culminating in a Strategic Rocket Forces drill in which Russia “nuked” Poland). The exercises demonstrated weakness and incompetence, as well as force of numbers and nasty thinking. But they made life hard for peacemongers and strengthened the arguments of NATO hawks and the twitchy eastern Europeans.

Russia’s latest political move adds insult to injury. It has formally proposed a new security treaty to NATO, which would specifically prohibit the alliance from making military plans or positioning forces in a way that Russia does not like. This is the latest iteration of what is commonly known as the “Medvedev Plan”—the idea of creating a new, realpolitik-based, security architecture for Europe which would weaken NATO, bypass the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe, and sideline America.

Apart from the ever-enthusiastic Silvio Berlusconi, Italy’s prime minister, there seems little enthusiasm for any version of this plan in Europe. It might have had a better chance when the Bush administration was testing Atlanticist loyalties to destruction, and when Gerhard Schröder was running Germany and Jacques Chirac was president of France. Now it looks like a non-starter.

It is just what Polish, Czech and Baltic politicians need to bolster their arguments. But it is hard to see how this sort of thing helps Russia.

A crisis is an expensive lesson, and wasting anything expensive is bad. So Estonians should use these hard times to take a hard look at themselves, their society and their state, and work out how to dump bad habits and adopt good ones. Learning from your own mistakes is good and learning from other people’s is even better. So Estonians should also look south to Latvia to see what may happen if current bad tendencies persist.

There are no quick fixes, only important changes. Independence was not a panacea. nor was introducing the kroon, or joining NATO and the EU. Adopting the euro will be no panacea either: it is a necessary condition for solid prosperity in future, but not a sufficient one.

Estonia should not respond to the crisis by running to Russia’s arms in the hope of big money and a happy life. I travel a lot to Moldova, Bulgaria and Latvia. They all tried making friends with Russia in the hope of good results. The price is high and the benefits scanty.

It would also be wrong for Estonia to abandon the liberal, open, westward-oriented economic policy of the past 17 years. It was not and is not the government’s job to sort out the economy by intervention, subsidy and other meddling.

But it is also not the government’s job just to sit back and let people make money. A degree of smugness and complacency in government is one reason why we had such an over-heated lending boom in lending and property speculation. That made the Estonian economy vulnerable to the world downturn. It raised costs, stoked debts, and now hurts competitiveness.

Inattentive and careless government at the municipal level has ruined the Tallinn cityscape by a jumble of ugly skyscrapers. The city survived Soviet occupation with only two nasty skyscrapers. If Estonians in 1992 could have looked into the future to see the bad planning that has now uglified1 their beautiful capital, I think they would have been shocked and disappointed... How much these bad town-planning decisions result from incompetence, and how much from corruption is for the voters to decide.

Estonia after the Euro needs to concentrate much more on the quality of life, not the quantity of money. Estonian competitiveness in the long run cannot rest just on low costs. Nor will Estonia be able to compete to attract the brightest brains by offering the biggest money. But it can be a clean, safe, enjoyable, interesting friendly place to live. That will keep Estonians from emigrating, encourage Estonians abroad to come back, and make it easier for foreign employers to send their best workers here.

Making Estonia more foreigner-friendly will come at a price. For the first 20 years of regained independence the effort has been on consolidating national identity, restoring the primacy of the Estonian language and rebuilding the country’s elite. Now it is time to think a bit differently, and to give more emphasis to Estonia as a country open to talents and ideas from outside. It is shocking that Estonians who have graduated from the world’s top universities are not coming back home to teach and study. They say they are treated as outsiders. A small country such as Estonia cannot afford any cartels and protectionism-it needs the best ideas and the best people, everywhere and always.

Another bad habit that needs dumping is the politicisation of the civil service. Estonia’s public servants used to be remarkably good: professional and apolitical. That has begun to change at a national level and is already deplorable in some bits of local government. The idea that a public servant’s career depends on joining a particular party is corrosive of the principles of freedom and justice on which the Estonian Republic’s future rests. It means that the quality of public services and administration worsens. It rewards creeps and bullies, and penalises the honest and fair-minded. It helps clans, groups and other interests to bend the state to their will, which in turns makes it easier for hostile foreign powers to manipulate the country. Strong public institutions, widely respected and ably run, are the cornerstone of national security.

Estonia is still a success story. As a foreign correspondent who has spent nearly 20 years living in Estonia, visiting, and writing about it, I have been delighted to report so much good news. But I worry that the pipeline of good stories is looking a bit empty. E-government, Skype and cyber-defence-to take three stories which got Estonia lots of good publicity-in each case had an element of hype. But they reflected real-life successes. Now I find my editors are interested in different stories: the combination of economic crisis, western weakness and Russian revanchism is a particularly scary one. It is the main story now in Latvia. I hope it will not be for Estonia too.

Thursday, December 03, 2009

DAMAGE control is never as good as damage prevention. Despite repeated reassurances, the countries of eastern Europe are worried about security. Their biggest concern is NATO, where officials are meant to be drafting contingency plans to defend Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. Barack Obama pushed this idea at the NATO summit in April. A recent big Russian military exercise, which officials say culminated in a dummy nuclear attack on Poland, highlights the region’s vulnerability.

Yet little is happening. NATO officials blame a “lack of consensus”. Western European countries, notably Germany and Italy, are against anything that is not first discussed with Russia. A likely outcome is a generic plan, to be presented privately to the Baltic three in December, that will not deal with specific threats.

Nobody really expects a military conflict. But if NATO even hints that it is no longer in the business of guaranteeing the defence of all its members, it may encourage Kremlin mischief-making over such issues as minority rights or transit to Russia’s Kaliningrad exclave. Eastern Europeans are also cross about the European Union’s recent carve-up of top jobs. Germany and France showed that they decide the EU’s foreign policy, and that easterners do not count, says one minister in the region.

The Americans admit to botching the announcement in September of a new missile-defence plan—upgraded, not cancelled, they now insist. Vice-President Joe Biden has visited America’s main central European allies, as well as Ukraine and Georgia, to dispel feelings of neglect. A formidable American warship toured the Baltic during the Russian exercises. Six senior generals have visited Latvia alone in the past 12 months; bilateral military exercises are planned next year. The administration has offered Poland exercises with Patriot missile batteries armed with live warheads, whereas previously it had offered only dummy drills.

Few people anywhere mourn the departure of George Bush and the strains he placed on America’s allies. But his team of hard-bitten officials who dealt with eastern Europe is still missed. The idealistic Mr Obama has brought a different lexicon to foreign policy: realpolitik is in, talk of common values is out. Some find this a refreshing change from the hectoring of the Bush administration. But eastern Europeans are distressed to hear so much talk of “partners” (bracketing countries as different as China and Poland) and so little of “allies”.

A further worry is the effect on NATO of the war in Afghanistan. The more that NATO’s success there is defined as crucial to the alliance’s credibility, the more eastern members fear the consequences if it fails. Proportionately, eastern European NATO members have helped most in Afghanistan. The American-backed security pledge at the heart of NATO matters most to them too. Western Europeans who privately see NATO as an anachronism are unbothered by American disengagement.

Admittedly, the Obama administration is preoccupied with domestic issues and with other pressing matters abroad. Europe as a whole, not just the eastern Europeans, cannot expect constant nannying. But even in Washington concern is mounting as well. “Why is the most popular man on the planet, leading the world’s strongest country, unable to get relations with America’s closest allies right?” fumes one (apolitical) former official.

Many explanations can be offered. Inexperience is one. European and American observers talk of disorganisation in the administration’s National Security Council. One European official speaks of a “black hole” there. Some note a tribal desire among Obamaites to be different from the Bushies: if they favoured eastern Europe, the new policy must be chillier. Others blame a habit of preferring a friendly atmosphere to tough decisions. “It is not irredeemable. But they have to redeem it,” says Kurt Volker, another former official.

Part of the problem is that the EU and NATO are so frustrating to deal with. The fault lies on both sides—but some of it reflects bad staff work that has made Mr Obama’s summits with the EU and NATO both boring and useless. Even where interests chime, progress is slow. A year after the EU first mooted its “eastern partnership” to boost western ties with six ex-Soviet countries (Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Georgia, Moldova and Ukraine), talks on American involvement are only just starting. A stronger Europe policy in Washington might make easterners less twitchy about America’s dealings with Russia.

Such worries have led Poland to push for a stronger bilateral security commitment from America. That is ambitious, but also risky. If it fails, it could heighten the sense of abandonment. If it succeeds, it could create a two-tier NATO in the east: a few countries with a direct relationship with America, and a vulnerable rump without. A senior Pole denies this is a danger, noting that Polish military plans already include defence of Lithuania. The stronger Poland is, the more it can protect its neighbours. “They are our West Berlin,” he says. Hardly a comforting thought.

A defence of last week's column about Europe's new foreign ministerLAST week’s column on Lady Ashton’s appointment as the European Union’s high representative for foreign policy attracted a flurry of comments. Many were negative and some of them furious.

The criticism falls into two categories. Some readers see nothing wrong with the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (for which the then Ms Ashton worked in the late 1970s and early 1980s). They see it as a noble (or at least well-intentioned) organisation, which attempts to rid the world of nuclear weapons—a cause, one might add, also backed by Ronald Reagan and Barack Obama. The fact that the Soviet Union supported some of CND’s goals is neither here nor there: ideas are not responsible for the people who believe in them. From this point of view, Lady Ashton has nothing to apologise for. To term past association with CND as in any way as culpable as having had some indirect ties to the apartheid regime in South Africa is a grotesque smear. That cause was basically evil whereas the “peace movement” was basically good.

A second group of readers believe that the past is simply irrelevant. CND may or may not have been a Soviet front. But at the time it was a cause which in its broad aims enjoyed support from many people and most of Britain’s Labour Party (including Tony Blair). Suggesting that Lady Ashton deserves particular opprobrium is mean-minded and unfair, and is probably part of a hidden agenda to discredit her in order to (insert favourite conspiracy theory here).

The smoke from straw men being incinerated risks clouding the debate. The column explicitly conceded that many people supported CND for rational and genuine motives. CND affiliation is quite unlike a past in, say, the pro-Soviet wing of the Communist Party of Great Britain. Some may find it uncomfortable when a moral giant like Vladimir Bukovsky says that western peace movements were financed and orchestrated by the Soviet Union, but he is a serious person and his allegation deserves a hearing. However, the column explicitly did not say that Lady Ashton had done anything wrong, or that she was a communist fellow-traveller.

The column did note the oddity that west Europeans tend to be a bit amnesiac about the horrors of communism and the culpability of people in the west who defended it (which at the time included at least some members of CND and the Labour Party). But they have lively memories and finely tuned moral reflexes when dealing with some other issues, especially ones that are safely long ago (such as slavery or colonialism) or involve enemies of unquestionable evil such as Nazi or apartheid regimes. That is a comfortable position, but not universally accepted or immune from criticism.

It was not west Europeans who were herded into cattle trucks to die of cold and hunger in Siberia. It was not west Europeans who had to choose between denouncing a colleague or seeing their own children denied education. It was not west Europeans who had to live in the stifling humiliating, backwardness and stagnation of the late communist era. It was not west Europeans who got shot if they tried to flee their own country.

Lady Ashton’s supporters may well feel that dragging up an innocent and unrelated episode in her past career is hurtful and unfair. But from many east Europeans’ point of view, the peace movement risked prolonging communist rule by weakening the west’s pressure on the evil empire. As the EU’s foreign-affairs chief, she has to represent them too. Simply denouncing as bigots those who mind about this issue will aggravate the concern, not dispel it.

IMAGINE a British Conservative politician—call her Catriona Aston—coming from obscurity to gain one of the top posts in the European Union, just as Lady (Catherine) Ashton (pictured) has emerged from the Labour ranks to be the EU’s new foreign minister. Imagine that on closer scrutiny it turns out that in the early 1980s the fictional Ms Aston worked for a cold-war think-tank called something like the “African Freedom Foundation”, which campaigned against the spread of communism in Africa. Imagine that on closer examination it turns out that this outfit enjoyed strong behind-the-scenes support from the then apartheid government in South Africa. Among its supporters and officials are unrepentant defenders of the fascist regimes in Spain and Portugal and even those who said that Nazism had been a lesser evil than communism.

It is easy to imagine what would happen. The hapless Ms Aston would be publicly disgraced and would have to resign forthwith. How could an EU representative credibly deal with the developing countries when she in the past had been a defender of a racist colonial regime? Nuance, context and balance would go out of the window. Nobody would ask if all causes supported by the former South African regime were equally evil, or if communism had maybe cost more African lives than apartheid.

Against that hypothetical background, the lack of fuss about the real life Catherine Ashton’s involvement with the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) in the 1980s looks puzzling. Ms Ashton (as she was then) was a paid organiser for CND in the late 1970s and its treasurer from 1980-82.

It is worth remembering that CND was (and is) a legal organisation. It encompassed a wide range of views. Some supporters simply wanted Britain to get rid of its outdated and expensive “independent” nuclear deterrent. Others thought that the Reagan administration’s decision to put medium-range cruise and Pershing nuclear missiles in Europe was mistaken. Some idealists believed that a strong peace movement in Western Europe would inspire those behind the Iron Curtain to demand disarmament from their rulers too. Some were outright pacifists; others argued that nuclear weapons were so dangerous that “better red than dead” was the only rational approach.

Yet the fact remains that the Kremlin found CND and other “peace movements” useful ways of undermining the unity of NATO, weakening the West’s defence posture and stoking anti-Americanism. The ex-dissident Vladimir Bukovsky, an expert in Soviet penetration of the West, says: “the worldwide disarmament campaign in the early 1980s was covertly orchestrated from Moscow. To a substantial extent it was also funded by the Soviet bloc”.

As CND’s treasurer, Ms Ashton argued publicly for the organisation to produce audited accounts, to counter allegations of covert Soviet support. That does not convince Mr Bukovsky. CND funding, and who knew what when, may merit further investigation.

The real scandal, though, is the West’s continuing amnesia about the cold war. Given the Soviet Union’s history of mass murder, subversion, and deceit, it is astonishing that even tangential association with Soviet-backed causes in the past does not arouse the moral outrage now that is still so readily evoked by connections with the (undisputedly revolting) regime in South Africa. Most CND veterans see their peacenik days, at worst, as romantic youthful idealism. Warm-hearted but soft-headed, maybe: but better than being cold-hearted and hard-headed.

That is a shameful cop-out. Imagine a 1980s Europe where CND had triumphed, with left-wing governments in Britain and Germany scrapping NATO, surrendering to Kremlin pressure and propping up the evil empire. Her opponents complain that Lady Ashton is ineffective. As a CND organiser, that may have been a blessing.

COMMUNIST bullies had a nasty trick when dealing with opponents who had children: they took them away, sometimes to be adopted by childless party stalwarts, in nastier cases to be sent to orphanages and treated as the children of criminals, or even to be consigned to an asylum. In retrospect it seems astonishing that Endre and Ilona Marton, a married couple working for American news agencies in Hungary at the height of the Stalinist era, exposed their two small daughters to such risks, their greatest fear. But they did. Decades later the younger, Kati (pictured with Bill Clinton), has pieced together her family’s missing history, a series of torments that epitomises the human cost of the communist seizure of central Europe.

Ms Marton’s main source is the now declassified secret-police files compiled by the AVO, Hungary’s version of the KGB. They chronicled minutely her parents’ professional and social lives, which moved in ever-decreasing circles as the communist grip on Hungary tightened. Sometimes the result is welcome: an AVO snooper’s stolid note brings back long-forgotten memories of a summer picnic. More often it is grim: almost everyone, it turns out, was informing on the Martons, from neighbours to the nanny. Through it all, her father baffled his persecutors, who could not believe that the suave, stylish polyglot was just what he claimed to be: a hard-living, hard-playing newsman. His undoing came when a traitor in the American embassy reported that he had lent to officials there a copy of an official document, the state budget. Not exactly a secret, but pretext enough to send him to be broken in the AVO’s dungeons.

Few grown-ups come out well in this story. Hungarian officials were callous and uncomprehending. Friends proved unreliable. Mr Marton’s American employers dithered, while American diplomats doubted the Martons’ reliability. Mr Marton’s bravado remains incomprehensible, even to his adoring daughter 50 years later. In the midst of it all are two little girls, precociously aware of the dramas swirling around them, left crying on the pavement when their mother is snatched from their home to join their father in jail. A Utah couple, reading that the girls were being brought up by strangers, offered, in vain, to adopt them.

Ms Marton avoids being too self-centred or sentimental as she tells the story. She highlights uncomfortable discoveries—her parents’ infidelities, that her grandparents perished at Auschwitz—as well as noble ones. Her descriptions of Hungary, of communist history and of secret-police tactics are all sharply drawn. So is the portrayal of the family’s life in America: they managed to escape after the 1956 uprising. The happy ending comes as a great relief after so many nerve-racking pages.

Czechoslovakia was born out of trickery and died in failure. Only up to a point

Czechoslovakia: The State That Failed. By Mary Heimann. Yale University Press; 406 pages; $45 and £25. Buy from Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk

OUTSIDERS tend to have a soft spot for Czechoslovakia. Poignant music by Leos Janacek, Antonin Dvorak and Bedrich Smetana recalls the struggle for nationhood that culminated in the creation in 1918 of a commendably decent country. Western perfidy at Munich brought its dismemberment at Nazi hands. Stories of courage and anguish leap out from the pages of novels by Milan Kundera (“The Unbearable Lightness of Being”), Josef Skvorecky (“The Engineer of Human Souls”) and Ivan Klima (“Judge on Trial”). Vaclav Havel, the dissident playwright turned philosopher-president, exemplifies the magical triumph of the Velvet Revolution, 20 years ago this week.

Hooks for outside affection abound. Czechoslovaks were strongly Atlanticist. The country owed its existence to President Woodrow Wilson, and Tomas Masaryk, its first president, had an American wife. The combination of high culture and glorious architecture reminded Westerners that it was communist captivity that made “Eastern Europe” backward and miserable. Guilt chipped in too. The West betrayed Czechoslovakia in 1938. It stood by as the Soviet-backed Communists seized power in 1948, and again when Soviet tanks crushed the Prague Spring in 1968. And Czech and Slovak dissidents were far more agreeable than their weird and prickly counterparts elsewhere.

Mary Heimann’s scalpel shreds this uplifting version of history. Inter-war Czechoslovakia was essentially a fraud, she argues, both in its composition and its reputation for liberalism. The wily duo of Masaryk and Eduard Benes (the dominant politicians of the years that followed) duped the victorious Western allies into agreeing to the creation of a new country. Named after only two of its ethnic groups, it ignored the interests of all the others: chiefly Germans, who outnumbered the Slovaks, and Hungarians. Its unjust treatment of the Sudeten Germans, stranded by the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian empire, ultimately caused the first Czechoslovak republic’s downfall.

After pointing out the intolerance, censorship and semi-authoritarianism of pre-war Czechoslovakia, Ms Heimann, an American-born historian at the University of Strathclyde in Scotland, then highlights the anti-Semitism and autocracy that followed the Munich agreement. Sympathetic observers have tended to blame that on Czechoslovak disappointment with the West; she suggests that it was a culmination of existing tendencies. The Nazi occupation that came next met minimal resistance. Her vinegary attention then turns to the diplomatic manoeuvring of exiled Czechoslovak leaders such as Benes and Jan Masaryk, son of Tomas. History normally portrays them as exiled patriots engaged in a gallant struggle. Ms Heimann, however, sees a story of Czech guile and Western gullibility. How was it, exactly, that a bunch of failed émigré politicians were able to gain the status of a legitimate government-in-exile, she asks?

The three post-war years before the communist seizure of power in 1948 come across not as a blessed breathing space between two totalitarian regimes, but as a horrible period of racial revenge: rape, robbery and deportation inflicted on guilty and blameless Germans alike. The Communists then created what she rightly calls a “Stalinist hell”—but with the support of quite a large chunk of the population.

Nor is Ms Heimann fooled by the Prague Spring: not an exuberant experiment in creating “socialism with a human face” but the by-product of a factional fight in the Communist Party. Even the 1989 revolution, she argues, only accelerated the changes already being planned. Soon after, the invented country of Czechoslovakia fell to pieces; the reader can almost hear her applauding.

Myth-busting is fun but it can easily become tiresome.

Ms Heimann ably highlights the holes and contradictions in Czechoslovak history. Her archival research and attention to detail is exemplary. But she spoils her case by sounding spiteful. The story of the revival of the Czech language in the 19th century deserves more than mockery. Although she pays fleeting tribute to Mr Havel she cannot resist qualifying it by saying that he “appears to have had” moral courage in addition to “an idiosyncratic brand of ambition”; that, she argues, fooled the West into seeing post-communist Czechoslovakia more favourably. This approach shamefully underplays the gritty determination of the Communist-era dissidents and of their friends in the West, who often felt they were fighting a hopeless battle.

Ms Heimann is right to highlight the messy opportunism that surrounded the break-up of the Habsburg empire. Czechoslovakia was an artificial creation. But so, in the end, are all countries. Inter-war Czechoslovakia treated Germans badly. But it was still a far more attractive country in terms of civil rights (for example in the treatment of Jews) than any of its neighbours, especially Hitler’s Germany. The post-war punishment of the Germans was indeed deplorable—but the aftermath of wars is often horribly messy. Czechoslovak communists may have been exceptionally revolting; but the democrats were often magnificent. Clear-eyed historical reminders are always welcome. Like everyone, Czechs and Slovaks have plenty to be ashamed of. But they have plenty to be proud of too.

Thursday, November 19, 2009

AS THE countries of eastern Europe bump nervously between a near-neutralist Germany, a revisionist Russia and an absent-minded America, the search is on for a powerful outsider, with strong interests in the region, willing to put all kinds of clout behind the smaller countries’ sovereignty and independence.

Once, Britain filled that role. The Royal Navy helped the Baltic states win their independence after the first world war. Britain also ruled the southern part of Georgia as a protectorate from 1918 to 1920 and sent a daring expedition to Baku to push back the Bolshevik presence there. But Britain’s imperial star, with the shame and glory that it brought, has waned. Who can fill the gap?

Maybe China. It has plenty of reasons to develop a presence in eastern Europe, ranging from trade to geopolitics. It has expressed interest in buying Estonian Air (currently up for sale by SAS, its owner). That would give China a “domestic” European Union airline and access to a low-cost airport. Or imagine that China lends Ukraine some money to pay next year’s gas bill; perhaps in exchange for a favourable privatisation of some asset long-coveted by the Kremlin.

The result of such moves would be to place a conspicuous foot in Russia’s front yard. From a Chinese point of view, that is potentially provocative, but also perhaps quite satisfying. It would also have other benefits. Beijing would be glad to have some more allies inside the EU or in its waiting room, in addition to the ones it already has, such as Cyprus. A NATO country would be a bonus. Eastern Europe could also be an attractive low-cost manufacturing base to increase market share inside the EU, dodging protectionist pressures, higher transport costs and other impediments to feeding the European desire for cheap goods directly from China itself.

A rising Chinese presence would put eastern Europe back on the map. But flirting always brings the risk of seduction. Russia may be a nuisance now, but it is declining. Fending it off by giving a rising China a big bridgehead in Europe could look a dangerous mistake in 20 years time.

Another problem is values. Some ex-captive nations (Czechs and Lithuanians particularly) feel sincere outrage about the plight of occupied Tibet. The Dalai Lama (pictured above) is an honoured visitor, not a pariah as he seems to be in Washington, DC under Barack Obama’s administration. Reluctance to cosy up to communists of any stripe is still a reflex in most of the region. When slave labour camps are part of your family history, you may feel a bit queasy about seeking friendship with a country whose system of prison labour looks unpleasantly similar to the Soviet gulag. Two countries—Latvia and Macedonia—came close to establishing full diplomatic relations with Taiwan (“Free China” in cold-war terms) in the 1990s. “Red China” wants to dominate the world. Why help?

On the other hand, worries about principles prove no barrier to economic and security ties where countries like Saudi Arabia or Uzbekistan are concerned. If warmer relations with China enable the ex-communist countries of Europe to brace themselves better against a Russo-German squeeze, many may argue that this is a price worth paying.

A final argument is the idea that eastern Europe could help China change. Russia’s chaos and missed opportunities over the past 20 years are seen as a warning by Chinese policymakers and opinion-formers. They have paid less attention to the success stories. Demonstrating that a multi-party system and the rule of law can take root after decades of one-party dictatorship is a potentially powerful message.

Friday, November 13, 2009

ONE kind of foreigner loves English libel law. Anyone anywhere in the world who can prove that someone in England has bought, read or downloaded potentially defamatory material about them can start a court case. Merely initiating a defence generally costs the author or publisher at least £50,000 ($84,000). If the case ever comes to court, the costs are much higher. In 2007 Rinat Akhmetov, a Ukrainian tycoon, went to a London court to sue a Ukraine-based website about an article published only in Ukrainian—though read in Britain—and won. In a similar case a wealthy Saudi sued an American author for claims made in a book published in America which sold a handful of copies in Britain. He won too. Neither defendant was represented in court.

But foreigners who mind about free speech do not like English libel laws. Several American states have now passed laws entitling victims of “libel tourism” to counter-sue their persecutors for harassment. Big American news organisations have spent millions defending themselves against libel suits brought in London. As their budgets shrivel, so does their willingness to fork out. Some are threatening to stop selling in Britain, and to block access to their websites from British internet users. Their concern has pricked the House of Commons media committee to look at whether the law needs changing: it is due to report shortly.

Libel law in England is not just expensive and wide-ranging (Scotland, with its own legal system, is a bit different); it also one of the most claimant-friendly systems in the world (Ireland comes a close second). That is because the law requires the defendant to prove that what he said is true, fair or legally privileged; it does not offer the strong free-speech defence that America’s first amendment provides. This hefty burden of proof, coupled with high costs, chills debate and hampers investigation into everything from consumer affairs to genocide.

Pressure groups dealing with issues such as war crimes are campaigning for reform. Scientists have got involved too. A prominent British science writer, Simon Singh, is facing a potentially ruinous libel action brought by a body representing chiropractors (who offer a form of alternative medicine with quasi-religious roots and maintain, among other things, that spine massage can improve the body’s “innate intelligence”). Mr Singh called chiropractice “bogus”. England’s senior libel judge, Mr Justice Eady, ruled that to defend this description, Mr Singh must prove that the chiropractors were not just deluded, but knowingly peddling false remedies. Mr Singh is appealing.

Like other media organisations, this newspaper has a vested interest in changing English libel law (it regularly spends large amounts of money defending itself, usually successfully, in libel actions). It is therefore important to note that there are arguments on both sides. Defamation can ruin lives; it is right that the law should offer redress to the wronged. Being a foreigner should not disqualify someone from defending a reputation in England; in some cases, English courts may be the only hope for the righteous.

But England’s libel law has become a playground for lawyers, sparring on behalf of the powerful. That needs to change. A good initial reform would be to rule that libel cases may be heard in English courts only when the material concerned has been deliberately published in England. That would stop the most absurd instances of libel tourism. Other sensible ideas under discussion include capping damages and strengthening the existing public-interest and fair-comment defences—in effect shifting the burden of proof.

Another sensible reform would be to allow cases to come to court only after an attempt to settle them amicably outside it—the current emphasis in family-law disputes too. That would offer a cheap and quick way of resolving those arguments that arose out of mistakes, where a prompt apology or a correction matters much more than damages. It would also make life easier for humble claimants with genuine grievances but without access to expensive lawyers. And it might make English law less appealing to those who use it to intimidate anyone investigating their guilty secrets.

“MR GORBACHEV, tear down this wall”. Ronald Reagan’s stirring speech at the Berlin Wall on June 12th 1987 was not the death blow to communism, but it did highlight the West’s renewed confidence in demanding what had previously been impossible. Though the president’s advisers egged him on, American diplomats were horrified at what they felt was provocative behaviour: they saw their job as managing relations with communism, not trying to overturn it.

Those glory days were the subject of a day-long conference at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in Simi Valley California on November 6th. A motley collection of heroes from east and west (with your columnist tagging along as a moderator) gathered to discuss the great communicator’s role in the collapse of communism and what his approach could still offer today. Nancy Reagan, frail but immaculate, presided. Margaret Thatcher and Mikhail Gorbachev sent messages of congratulation. Freedom fighters such as Mart Laar from Estonia, Leszek Balcerowicz from Poland and Vaclav Klaus of the Czech Republic recalled how Reagan’s approach had inspired them and demoralised their captors.

Many of the surviving members of the Reagan foreign-policy team turned up too, including John Lehman (navy secretary), Dick Allen (chief foreign policy adviser) Richard Pipes (Russia expert) and the towering figure of George Shultz (secretary of state).

It is easy to forget what a daunting task these men had faced when they came to office in 1980. America was traumatised by Vietnam, intimidated by the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, humiliated by the Iranian hostage crisis, and near-bankrupted by the economic downturn (will an incoming administration in three years’ time face something similar, wondered some people gloomily). The best option in foreign policy seemed to be presiding over inexorable Western decline as peacefully as possible.

Admittedly, whatever was happening in the West, communism would have been in trouble. Discontent among the public, divisions in the elite and economic failure would have all been gnawing away at the regimes’ stability and legitimacy. The confidence that Reagan exuded and inspired made the western star burn brightly, lifting captives’ spirits and dazzling their jailers. The America of Jimmy Carter or the Britain of the mid-1970s hardly provided a compelling alternative to communism.

In retrospect, the efficiency and decisiveness of the Reagan administration is striking. It arrived in office promptly and en masse, filling all important posts within weeks (nowadays getting the team straight within the first year is regarded as smart work). It knew exactly what it wanted to do and did it (not something that could be said so easily of the current administration). John Lehman recounted with gusto how he sent a big naval force to the north coast of Norway, against the howls of protest from officials who thought it would be provocative. Far from it: it put a direct stop to the de facto Soviet naval takeover of the region.

Communist propaganda depicted Ronald Reagan as a brainless gunslinger. In fact he was well read and wrote reams. And as George Shultz pointed out in his lunchtime speech, he used American armed force sparingly, on only three occasions—in forestalling a Marxist coup in Grenada, in bombing a terrorist headquarters in Tripoli, and in an operation against an Iranian ship that was planting mines. “Reality, strength, diplomacy” were his watchwords. “And no empty threats”. He also underlined Mr Reagan’s desire to rid the world of nuclear weapons—something on which Mr Shultz continues to work. The thousand-plus assorted Reaganites in the audience clapped that too.

It was hard not to feel a bit nostalgic for the days when grown-ups were in charge.

Sunday, November 08, 2009

Could a former president of Latvia make it as the European Union president?

OPTIMISTIC Latvians are thin on the ground these days. The combination of fractious politics and a dismal economic outlook blunts the enthusiasm of even the most cheerfully patriotic soul. All the more reason, therefore, to applaud the announcement that the country’s former president, Vaira Vike-Freiberga, is running for the job of president of the European Union.

At first sight, Ms Vike-Freiberga’s chances seem vanishingly slim. And at a second glance they don’t look much fatter. On the plus side, she speaks perfect French. She is a woman. And she has no big enemies. Observers of Latvian politics in the years 1999-2007 (admittedly, not exactly a mainstream hobby in Brussels) remember her as an uncommonly effective president of that country. She proved a powerful bulwark against over-mighty tycoons bent on suborning Latvia’s independent institutions and a strong defender of probity in public office.

If big European countries cannot agree on a big personality from a big country, perhaps they might like a big personality from a small one (Ms Vike-Freiberga’s protocol-heavy grandeur is the stuff of legends among outsiders used to the laid-back style of other Baltic politicians). Her backers recall that she emerged from nowhere in 1999 after a deadlock between Latvia’s powerbrokers. Perhaps she could pull off the same trick in Brussels. Her life story—a refugee who fled the Soviet occupation in 1944, became a professor in Canada and then returned to usher her homeland into the EU and NATO—is captivating. She would bridge the gap between the eastern and western halves of the continent and talk to Barack Obama as one North American to another.Unlike some Baltic politicians, she is not detested in Russia (which matters, apparently). During celebrations in 2005 to mark the 60th anniversary of the end of the second world war she went to Moscow, while her Estonian and Lithuanian counterparts stayed away in protest at what they saw as Soviet triumphalism.

But anyone who overlooks the seemingly insuperable obstacles to her candidacy has probably been over-indulging in Black Balsam, Latvia’s hallucinogenic national drink (it tastes of burnt orange peelings). She has no serious backers, is all but unknown, and comes from a country that is widely regarded as an ill-governed basket case. Indeed, some fear that her candidacy may detract from the chances of Latvia’s real EU star, the energy commissioner Andris Piebalgs, gaining a serious portfolio in the new commission.

But Ms Vike-Freiberga’s Quixotic bid for high office does have two virtues. One is to show that Latvia has impressive public figures as well as the eccentric, inadequate and questionable ones that have tended to be on public display since she left office. That may be something of a morale-booster. Not many east European countries could boast a candidate of her calibre. The other is to highlight the continuing under-representation of people from the ex-communist countries in top jobs in international organisations. Whether in the higher ranks of NATO, the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe, the European Central Bank, or the European Union, the easterners are conspicuous by their rarity or invisibility.

That is partly a matter of time (the post-communist generation will be better candidates than their parents), and partly the result of disunity, bad tactics and outright sabotage from the home side when an east European candidate does have a chance. But at least in part it also reflects an informal cartel among the countries of “old Europe” in dividing the spoils of office. If Ms Vike-Freiberga’s candidacy does nothing more than to shake that up, then it will have been well worth it.

The ex-communist economies have not collapsed. But finding new ways to catch up with the West will be hard

Illustration by Peter Schrank

EVEN at the height of the ex-communist countries’ boom in 2006, almost half their citizens felt they lived worse than in 1989. Yet that glum verdict on 17 years of liberalisation, privatisation and stabilisation was tempered by another finding. Most of those polled by the World Bank and European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) said they were optimistic about their children’s prospects.

The worry is that the global economic crisis has dented confidence in the future and intensified gloom about the present. Fast growth eased dissatisfaction with corrupt politicians and bossy bureaucrats. It offered at least the chance of better health care and education, which lag far behind western standards. But the average decline in GDP this year is a whopping 6.2%; recovery is expected to be slow. So east Europeans face higher taxes, bigger debts, less public spending, lower pay and fewer jobs. They do not have the same shock-absorbers as in the west—which is where, in the eyes of many, the crisis originated.

That could prove a toxic mix, yet so far the fallout has been limited. Support from the European Union, the IMF and other lenders, after initial hesitation, was unprecedented in size, scope and speed. Tens of billions of dollars of outsiders’ money staved off a catastrophe. So far, no currencies have collapsed; no country has defaulted; no banks have faced runs, or been cut adrift by foreign owners. Politicians preaching protection, state control or other charlatanism have remained on the fringes. In its latest annual transition report, the EBRD says reform has largely stalled, but not reversed. In countries such as Latvia and Hungary, governments have shown a masochistic delight in following IMF prescriptions for fiscal tightening, even at the cost of likely electoral oblivion.

It makes little sense to talk of the ex-communist countries as a single region. Resource-dependent economies such as Russia and Kazakhstan have one set of problems (such as diversifying and spending export revenues wisely). Open manufacturing economies such as Hungary and Estonia have another (chiefly, maintaining competitiveness). Poland, bolstered by strong domestic demand, will be the only economy in the EU to grow this year (though its rising public debt is a worry). Two ex-communist countries, Slovenia and Slovakia, have already adopted the euro. Estonia may be next. Countries to the east and south tend to be poorer, glummer and worse-run.

For those in or close to the EU, growth came from strong exports of goods and services and big inflows of capital. The net effect was beneficial but the disadvantages are now apparent: heavy dependence on single industries (eg, cars in Slovakia) and on west European demand. Foreign capital inflows may have been too big or too quick, leading to a consumption and construction splurge, fuelled by reckless lending to firms and households, often in foreign currencies. Inflows of money from abroad have fallen dramatically, or in some cases even reversed. The volume of syndicated loans going to the region, for example, has fallen to roughly a sixth of the pre-crisis level. Restarting these capital flows is a high priority—preferably with more prudent rules for the credit market.

Alongside this problem is another: finding a way to share the pain of restructuring private-sector debts among governments, borrowers and bankers. Dealing with this product of past excesses causes much headscratching for policymakers. Debt overhangs—of over 100% of GDP in some countries—will curb growth in future years, hurting everyone.

Outside support has headed off a vicious circle of falling exchange rates, lower investor confidence and failing banks (though that may still loom in Ukraine, where vote-hungry politicians have just shredded a deal with the IMF). But many states face another grim outcome: years of low growth caused by uncompetitive exchange rates and sluggish productivity. That is what happened to Portugal after it joined the euro in 1999. For ex-communist countries in the euro, pegged to it or hoping to adopt it soon, the Portuguese example merits careful study.

The ex-communist economies’ competitive advantage may have shrunk, but it is still a big asset. Cost-cutting in western Europe may produce more outsourcing to the east. Some also hope to find new niches, based on brainpower and creativity. But they must also make their countries work better. According to the EBRD, four areas stand out. One is improving the legal system. Slow and unpredictable justice is a turn-off for foreign investors worried about contracts and property rights (see article). Second is better regulation. Despite improvements from EU membership, businesses still battle with profit-choking red tape. Third is a better social safety-net. A feeling that life is unfair and precarious sharpens the divide between winners and losers and risks political upsets. Fourth is competition. Informal barriers to entry and old networks of communist-era pals keep bits of the economy off limits to outsiders, at huge cost to efficiency.

Getting state institutions to function better is easier to discuss than to accomplish. It has long been clear that intangible factors to do with national culture and levels of social trust play a bigger role than explicit rules in ex-communist countries’ fortunes. The EBRD highlights “values, attitudes and practices” in determining what constitutes “acceptable behaviour within a firm…or by government officials”. Economics offers little guide to that.

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Regards

Edward

Bene Merito award

Without my foreknowledge, I was last year awarded the Bene Merito medal of the Polish Foreign Ministry. Although enormously honoured by this, I have sadly decided that I cannot accept it as it might give rise to at least the appearance of a conflict of interest in my coverage of Poland.

About me

"The New Cold War", first published in February 2008, is now available in a revised and updated edition with a foreword by Norman Davies. It has been translated into more than 15 foreign languages.
I am married to Cristina Odone and have three children. Johnny (1993, Estonia) Hugo (1995, Vienna) and Isabel (2003, London)